


Requiem For...I Don't Even Know What: X-Files, "Jump The Shark," and the End of the Lone Gunmen

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [29]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Lone Gunmen - Freeform, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 12:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2468714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I ponder the bizarrely wrong and obscurely painful last moments of the Lone Gunmen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiem For...I Don't Even Know What: X-Files, "Jump The Shark," and the End of the Lone Gunmen

 

  * Holy shit. Chris Carter killed off the Lone Gunmen.

Somehow I never found out about this. I don’t think anyone I knew, back in the day, was still watching at that point. I never watched  _The Lone Gunmen;_  I don’t even know if I knew about it at the time. TLG was canceled after, I believe, half a season; and according to the wikis, it ended with a cliffhanger to which “Jump the Shark” was meant to be the resolution. I of course never saw the cliffhanger but it doesn’t matter; they put in enough exposition to allow the uninitiated to follow the plot, though of course that doesn’t necessarily help us care about it. I have no investment, for instance, in Jimmy, Kimmy, or Yves Adele Harlow, all characters introduced for the Lone Gunmen and all, at least based on “Jump the Shark,” still struggling to attain a single dimension. 

Summarizing the plot in any great detail would be kind of pointless; basically, Yves has got wind of a terrorist plot involving a bioluminscent virus based on shark cartilage (there are sharks everywhere in this episode; remember there was a time when “jump the shark” suddenly became the catchphrase used to describe any TV show which had entered an irreversible decline) which is implanted in the human carrier by means of a cartilage capsule set to decay and release the virus at a certain point. There’s an envelope built around this involving Morris Fletcher (good to see you back, Morris, you somehow entertaining yet not at all lovable scumbag) and Doggett and Reyes, but that’s just so they can pass it off as an X-File; their incorporation into this episode is just as lame as Scully’s into “Three of a Kind” or Kirk and Spock into “Assignment: Earth.” The point is: the Lone Gunmen manage to chase the human ticking time bomb into the basement of a conference hotel and, with only one minute 40 seconds to spare, decide that the only way to save the world is to use the fire alarm to seal off the compartment before the guy blows up. They are, of course, trapped in the compartment with him, which means they will die too. It’s in keeping with the tone of the whole episode, and probably the entire show, that the writers appear to have staged this ending as much for the chance to do a reference to Spock’s death in  _ST II: The Wrath of Khan_ (see above) as for any other reason. _  
_

Still. I kept waiting for the moment at which we were going to discover that the Lone Gunmen weren’t really dead…and it never came. Just an apparently totally straight-faced eulogy from Scully, and the credits.

Dang, Chris! That was…well, I don’t even know how to feel about that. 

I guess at the end of the day, I think CC took the Lone Gunmen both more seriously and less seriously than I ever did. He must have thought there was more ‘there’ there than I ever perceived or he wouldn’t have tried to give them their own show. At the same time, “Jump the Shark” seems to want to have it both ways all the time: on the one hand, they’re pathetic losers, and on the other hand, they’re noble idealistic heroes trying to save the world. I see no reason why you couldn’t actually make that work; and yet in “Jump the Shark,” it really kind of doesn’t. I don’t think they were ever able to build enough complexity or nuance into any of the characters, and there isn’t much in the acting, either. They were kind of fun during the show’s heyday; but if the team ever put enough effort into developing them as stand-alone characters, there’s no evidence of that in “Jump the Shark.” They all seem kind of old, and tired, and slow-moving; depleted and emptied like their hacker basement. And while on the one hand their death is offered as something meant to be legitimately moving, on the other, it feels to me as if, after the failure of the spinoff, CC got mad at them, and one day he said to himself, I’ve had enough of their shit, I’m just going to put them down.

This is sad. It’s like the show is just losing bits and pieces of itself as it crawls toward the finish, and with each loss everyone has less emotional energy to mourn it. Even though I never apparently cared about them as much as Scully, Skinner, and the head writers did, I can’t help feeling like they got a raw deal. It seems unfair that characters who were always at their best as comic relief had to be put through something that tragic—even if it was all going to turn into a joke. 

***

P.S. When I wrote this, I still had some suspicion they might come back from the dead in "The Truth." In fact, they don't; they are merely brought back as ghosts/hallucinations to deliver a valedictory address from beyond the grave as Mulder goes on the run. Characteristically, they appear to him in the bushes while he is taking a piss by the side of the road. This does not make anything better. In fact, it's one of the worst and most awkward scenes in "The Truth," and that's saying summat. Paradoxically, Carter's attempt to ennoble them somehow only betrays whatever it was that was genuinely likeable about them. So strange. So very, very strange.





End file.
